I’ve been using Proton Mail and VPN for a while now, and I’m just wondering how everyone else feels about them. I have this kind of inherent alight distrust of them just because they seem like they offer a lot for free and kind of have a Big Tech vibe about them, but there’s nothing for me to really substantiate that distrust with, its mostly just a feeling. That being said, I do use their services as mentioned and they work pretty well, even on the free teir. So aside from that one instance where they gave that guy’s info to the feds, is there any reason not to trust them with my data?
No, but I trust audits
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/protonvpn-clears-its-latest-no-logs-audit/
I do agree they have a big tech feel that I don’t like, but everything I’ve seen indicates they’re trustworthy.
Trust but verify
I now go with “Never trust, always verify”, which is the tagline for zero trust in infosec.
You can’t create proton account anonymously very easily. If attempting to create account using for, you’re prompted to enter phone number or existing email iirc.
Edit: just tested, existing email is needed. This already tells they do not want people to create accounts in a privacy respecting way even if it’s somewhat trivial to bypass if you know how
Is it possible to use a throwaway email, such as tempmail.org?
Tempmail.com and temp-mail.org are blocking tor users. Tested some other random service that works, but proton blocked their mail domains
‘So aside from that one instance where they gave that guy’s info to the feds, is there any reason not to trust them with my data?’
They were under a court order. They still have to follow their country’s laws.
That is not to say you shouldn’t question them, but that particular example should not be used.
If that person had better opsec it never would have been a thing.
Plus, the data they gave was minimal, basically just the recovery email address, if I remember. That person got caught because they used the same address on Twitter (or something) and then they could get more data, if I recall correctly.
This is the key bit. So long as whatever they hand over still meets their services guidelines, the fact they cooperate with law enforcement is not in the least a knock to the promises they made.
It would be another matter altogether if they were providing law enforcement with logs or information they said they don’t collect.
People’s deductive reasoning is weak sauce.
Yeah I think most people confuse privacy with criminal behaviour. Proton has your back when it comes to the former, but they aren’t there to enable you to pirate or cause trouble, hiding behind their service.
I don’t see how making sure criminals are brought to justice is the same as protecting your anonymity on the net.
And even if mandated under law, it’s not like they actually log your travels and are handing that to law enforcement. Whatever they hand over still falls under their services guidelines.
“Criminals” such as climate activists?
The service could not appeal because a Swiss law had actually been broken and because “legal tools for serious crimes” were used.
Yep under Swiss law he was a criminal, we may not agree with the law but unfortunately that’s the case here
Yes. It’s not really Proton’s fault, but definitely unattractive to a user/customer
seem like they offer a lot for free
i gladly pay for proton knowing that i’m helping fund a critical tool for activists under oppressive regimes :)
more than google at least
Yeah i trust them more than the alternatives.
Based on my own privacy/security criteria, I chose and payed for protonmail when that was the only thing Proton had. I’ve been very happy with them and it’s nice to see how much they’ve since popped off.
I trust them, but always remain vigilant, because things can change over time. But the founders initially were scientists who met at CERN, not a company that launched a product. That tells me quite a lot. Yes, over time they are becoming more professional, maybe more like a regular company, but i feel that privacy is still the main priority for them. They also organize a yearly event and the money they raise goes to certain projects that are related to privacy and freedom (if i remember correctly for instance to help journalists remain free press and things like that). Yes, it’s one of the few companies that i really trust.
Also, yes, they sometimes are forced to give info to authorities (and they are quite open about that and explain what happened if people ask about that), but don’t forget that they don’t have much info on their clients, because everything is encrypted and they just cannot see what’s inside a mail, for instance. So, they can’t share that.
same here. one of a few companies that i actually trust. recent interview with CEO gave me even more confidence
Do you have a link for that interview?
Not sure if this is the one, but it is quite interesting regardless:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Hard to find but nice to watch 😀
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
In my view it’s either my ISP seeing everything or someone else. I don’t trust my ISP, I route my traffic to a different country where I don’t live in and them viewing my activity is potentially less of a problem, in my view (just in case they do manage to de-anonymize me)
route my traffic to a different country where I don’t live in and them viewing my activity is potentially less of a problem
Depending on where you live, and where your service resides, this could be tricky.
In the US, for instance, if you’ve chosen a provider in Australia, then a FVEY agreement could be in place to share that data. This gets around the technicality that intel gathering is not occurring on US soil and is not being done by the gov.
And again with the US, if you’ve chosen a country that’s not amiable to sharing user data, the US could very well be justifying that country as a target for pilfering data anyway.
So, that would leave choosing a service provider within the US, which should need to go through the FISA courts for any access to citizen data, but who knows after the Snowden revelations.
I guess that’s the state of privacy if you’ve got a nation state that’s targeted you for surveillance. Only way around it I can think of is data to be encrypted in transit and at rest, and only you control the keys. But that’s not something that’s going to happen with something like mainstream email anyway, too inconvenient for most folks (and you also don’t know if your recipients are security conscious either).
Thank you for explaining the gov surveillance part of it, that is a good point you’re making. There’s also the commercial surveillance I’m trying to avoid, in particular having my “psyche” profiled.
Route them to a country of some number of eyes? 😅
Wdym?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement In most of the cases there’s no point to route traffic to another country because they are all the United States of Eurasia
The only point remaining is preventing your ISP from profiling you
I don’t completely trust any “privacy-focused” company, but I trust proton a lot more than most others.
For my threat model and use case, I trust them.
I don’t trust them implicitly, but I do believe they are less likely to do certain things than Google which is enough to use them instead of Google for Email.
Proton Mail + Tor Browser + diligent OPSEC
Bingo bango, you don’t even have to trust them.
You very much do have to trust them. They make the client you’re using.
If someone injects malicious code into their client, it can transmit your mail unencrypted, or even just transmit your private key. Will they inject malicious code into their own client? Almost definitely not. The chances are basically zero. But if they get hacked and someone else does, then it’s the same result.
Also, unless all email you receive is encrypted with OpenPGP, you’re still trusting ProtonMail to encrypt it for you before they put it in their database.
So yes, you still have to trust them.
Wait… okay, I think we’re talking about two different things.
Emails you send or receive are not private. End of story. That’s nothing to do with the provider; they’re just not. SMTP is from the stone age of internet when nothing was private, and the attempts to graft a layer of encryption on top of it are from the bronze age, when encryption wasn’t very standardized or well-tested against real threats, and all of that shows. Even if you put a significant amount of work into grafting full end-to-end PGP encryption on top of the best your provider can do to keep your emails private, it doesn’t work. Emails are not private.
What I assumed you were interested in was in separating your non-private collection of emails from your real world identity. Proton + Tor will do that, bang on. If you’re trying to send and receive messages which are genuinely private, use one of the fairly good options which can do that (Signal or Matrix maybe). If you’re trying to send and receive your non-private emails without it being linked to your real world identity, use Proton + Tor. If you’re trying to send and receive SMTP emails without people being able to read them, you need to rethink what you want, because you’re not going to be able to get that.
Proton can be anonymous, yes, just like every other email service. I think OP was wondering more about how they protect your privacy when you’re using them non-anonymously. I could be wrong though.
But yeah, don’t use email if you don’t trust your email provider. Setting up your own email server for receiving mail isn’t too hard. Most ISPs don’t block incoming traffic on port 25, only outgoing traffic. It’s the sending part that sucks when you run your own server. Even if your ISP doesn’t block outbound port 25, your IP is probably already on several spam blacklists. :(
But yeah, don’t use email if you don’t trust your email provider.
Not sure how much more I can simplify this: The “if you don’t trust your email provider” has no place in this sentence. Don’t use email if you need the content of your messages to be private. If someone’s looking at Proton because they think it’ll keep their emails private, then yes, that’s a bad idea. But that’s not because of the “Proton” part of that sentence; it’s because of the “emails” part, and setting up your own SMTP service will do nothing to remedy that (in fact it’ll make things worse because it’ll put your own IP address into the “Received-By” headers of every email you send out).
If you’re communicating with someone you know who’s also running their own email server, there is no problem with using email. Email is a good protocol, and it runs over TLS.
I’m not trying to argue or anything, but I think you should read this for a quite good overview of the issues involved with trying to secure SMTP email. You can also read any number of expert opinions saying the same thing, if you don’t believe me or that article.
If you’re communicating with someone you know who’s also running their own email server, there is no problem with using email.
So, basically, never. I’ve run several SMTP servers in my time. I’m having trouble thinking of an example of when I might have been communicating from one of them to someone else who also ran their own secure SMTP server. If you’re trying to set up a secure end-to-end communication channel with one specific person which involves work on both your ends, it’d be way easier and more secure to use some other transport protocol at that point.
Email is a good protocol
It is. 100%. Sorry if I gave the impression I didn’t think it was. For all its age and some amount of minor stone-age baggage it brought with it, SMTP is genuinely quite well-designed and still serves its purpose 43+ years later, which is incredibly impressive. That purpose is, insecure but reliable and interoperable communication.
it runs over TLS.
Yeah, so does your HTTP connection with Proton. That doesn’t mean the end-result system keeps your messages secure, any more than using HTTPS means Proton is secure.
You can read the article I linked to above, but basically the short version is that email is by the design of the protocol subject to being stored or transmitted unencrypted at various intermediate places as it’s being sent around, in ways that are by the design of the protocol impossible to prevent.
You’re not required to agree with me; you can think what you want, but that’s how I see it.
I mean, pretty much everything in that article applies to HTTP too. SMTP basically always runs through TLS now. If you ever get anything over an unencrypted connection, it’s almost 100% likely to just be spam. So mostly that article is complaining about your email being unencrypted on your provider’s server. Well, your Facebook messages are stored unencrypted too. So are your Slack messages. And Discord. And Twitter DMs.
I wrote and run the email service Port87, so I’m pretty familiar with how this all works. Email through a third party is about as secure as any other messenger. It’s not like Outlook.com is any less trustworthy than Discord.
I don’t need to trust anyone to use Port87, because I wrote it, but my users have to trust me, just like Google’s users had to trust me when I worked there, and Facebook’s users had to trust me when I worked there. You trust thousands of people when you use these companies’ products.
If someone is looking for end to end encrypted communication, I agree, they are probably better suited by another protocol. SMTP is really good at what it’s designed to do.
…Tor Browser?
Also by “injecting malicious code” do you mean XSS? Yeah, that can happen, and it’s usually not Protons fault. The emails are end-to-end encrypted and encrypted while in your inbox with public and private keys.
Tor Browser only protects your IP address.
Emails received from outside senders are only end to end encrypted if the sender is using OpenPGP or S/MIME. Otherwise, Proton receives them in plain text (the TLS encryption is terminated at their SMTP server). They promise that they don’t look at them before encrypting them for storage, but you have to trust that promise.
Injecting malicious code means either XSS or if their build pipeline gets hacked. These companies release builds through a pipeline (usually download source -> download dependencies -> build from source -> package -> sign -> notarize (for Apple) -> release), and anywhere along that pipeline can be vulnerable. They might update a dependency that got hacked and now they’re hacked too. One of their build servers might get hacked and now they’ve released a malicious build. You’re trusting them to verify not only their code and their build servers, but also every dependency update. That’s potentially millions of lines of code per year to vet. It’s probably fine, but you’re still trusting them.
As for whether an attack is their fault, it really doesn’t matter. The end result is your leaked data. They could do everything they possibly can to protect you, but they could still get hacked. You are trusting them when you use their service. I believe they’re trustworthy, which is why I’ve been using their service for years.
A note about me: I know all of this because I have worked in big tech for ~11 years (Facebook, Google, then LinkedIn), I wrote an end to end encrypted messenger (called Tunnelgram, now discontinued), and I wrote my own email service over the past two years (called Port87).
When I tried to register with a tor ip they asked for my phone number.
The issue with email, unless you are comumnicating between two Proton Mail accounts, is that your message will likely be stored on another server which is extremely likely to be unencrypted. The bottom line is that you can never trust the rest of the infrastructure, and you have no control over it. You can end-to-end encrypt using PGP, but this is extremely impractical.
Yeah, email is unsafe, agreed. I addressed that below, saying I thought they just wanted to separate their real-world identity from their un-private emails. If you’re trying to use Proton to keep your un-private emails private, you’re gonna have a bad time and you should use some good end-to-end solution that isn’t email instead.
Not at all. It woul be trivial for them to steal your private keys from their web client. And yes, we have the code. But it’s impossible to verify that the code that is on Github and the one they send to your browser every time you log in is exactly the same.
Also, they make it quite hard to make an anonymous registration. And they’ve been cooperating with governments. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t support criminal activity. But I don’t trust any government with citizen’s data, Snowden proved that.
Edit: Oh and they have bribed various privacy related sites with their affiliate program to recommend their services, which I consider a shady tactic.
Why is it trivial for them to steal your private keys? Does your computer unable to verify public keys?
I’m a bit of a novice when it comes to HTTPS handshakes
One of the bold claims of proton is that all your data is encrypted and they can’t see it (not 100% sure how they do it, probably your key is encrypted with your password as a symmetric key? Then when you log in, the client unlocks your private key and then that key unlocks the emails and stuff).
Now, it also turns out that they write the software that uses your key to decrypt the emails. It would be trivial for them to just send the keys back to themselves and decrypt all your stuff.
I don’t think this is a huge point against proton, as AFAIK no one else even offers encrypted email. But nonetheless I would like to see an api and some third party clients.
I see now, so it’s more on decrypting my data rather than stealing private keys in the context of httpscommunications. I thought for some reason it was about Proton VPN specifically.
Thank you for explaining!
No.
I trust no single hosted service, but you can use them with caution.
Depends. Are you on a wanted list?
😀
Proton used to have a deal with the Israeli company
Radware, for DDoS protection. They have written a few disclaimers about how Radware only handled incoming traffic still with two encryption layers intact (SSL & OpenPGPjs), as if that was some sort of real protection if a company has access to raw incoming traffic.Honestly, a company aimed at privacy, boasting of Swiss privacy, should know better than to route anything through Israeli companies.
